[[MaxSpevack|Max Spevack]] reminded[4] everyone about the upcoming FUDCon Brno. "We currently have 110 people registered for the event," and the list of sessions and hackfests is [[FUDCon/FUDConBrno2008|on the Fedora wiki]]. [[HansdeGoege|Hans de Goede]] will be attending FUDCon Brno. He wrote an update[5] about webcam support in Fedora, which will be worked on at FUDCon, and also blogged[6] about the session he will give on how to become a Fedora package maintainer.

+

[[MaxSpevack|Max Spevack]] reminded[4] everyone about the upcoming FUDCon Brno. "We currently have 110 people registered for the event," and the list of sessions and hackfests is [[FUDCon/FUDConBrno2008|on the Fedora wiki]]. [[HansdeGoede|Hans de Goede]] will be attending FUDCon Brno. He wrote an update[5] about webcam support in Fedora, which will be worked on at FUDCon, and also blogged[6] about the session he will give on how to become a Fedora package maintainer.

[4] http://spevack.livejournal.com/62369.html

[4] http://spevack.livejournal.com/62369.html

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==== '''virt-what''' Script Detects Running in a Virtual Machine ====

==== '''virt-what''' Script Detects Running in a Virtual Machine ====

−

[[RichardJones|Richard W.M. Jones]] announced[1] version 1.0 of [http://et.redhat.com/~rjones/virt-what/ | virt-what] which is a simple shell script that detects if you are running inside a virtual machine, and prints some "facts" about that virtual machine.

+

[[RichardJones|Richard W.M. Jones]] announced[1] version 1.0 of [http://et.redhat.com/~rjones/virt-what/ virt-what] which is a simple shell script that detects if you are running inside a virtual machine, and prints some "facts" about that virtual machine.

Fedora Weekly News keeps you updated with the latest issues, events and activities in the Fedora community.

If you are interested in contributing to Fedora Weekly News, please see our 'join' page. Being a Fedora Weekly News beat writer gives you a chance to work on one of our community's most important sources of news. Ideas for new beats are always welcome -- let us know how you'd like to contribute.

Ben Williams announced[0] that the Fedora Unity team has released a new re-spin of Fedora 8. "These Re-Spin ISOs are based on the officially released Fedora 8 installation media and include all updates released as of August 14th, 2008. The ISO images are available for i386, x86_64 and PPC architectures via Jigdo and Torrent starting Sunday August 24th, 2008. Go to http://spins.fedoraunity.org/spins to get the bits!"

The Fedora Education Spin is progressing[0], having been "approved by all necessary bodies - Spin SIG, Board, Rel-Eng", reported Sebastian Dziallas. The spin has its own feature page. "Hopefully, we'll be able to have a preview of the spin ready in the next weeks", added Sebastian.

Greg DeKoenigsberg reminded potential OLPC contributors[1] to surf over to the contributors' program on the OLPC wiki in order to request their own XO for development. Soon, Greg "will be sitting in on the weekly call that decides how these laptops are disbursed".

Michael DeHaan, holder of the coveted "best blogger on Planet Fedora" title, as determined each week by your correspondent, has penned a treatise[8] concerning the future of systems management software. "Cobbler and Func are very fun, I think they are quite useful, but I'm wondering what are next on the horizon for server management tech, not in terms of a evolutionary improvement but how things can be legitimately improved by fundamental, indeed 'paradigm-shifty' means." Click the link below to read the entire post.

David Nalley shared some details about the upcoming Fedora Ambassadors Day for North America[2]. The event will coincide with Ohio Linux Fest in October. David said, "If you are a Fedora Ambassador, or want to be one, you should try and attend."

Christoph Wickert attended FrOSCon 2008, along with several other other Ambassadors, and shared his event report[3]. "Just like on Linuxtag the Fedora booth was located close to the entrance, so we had quite a lot of visitors. Unfortunately the booth was a little small and we had lot of stuff to show: Two OLPCs, an eeepc, two ALIX Machines and a couple of Laptops. Everything was running Fedora, the Laptops were running Gnome and Xfce, mine also LXDE." Check out the link below for pictures, and the full report.

Max Spevack reminded[4] everyone about the upcoming FUDCon Brno. "We currently have 110 people registered for the event," and the list of sessions and hackfests is on the Fedora wiki. Hans de Goede will be attending FUDCon Brno. He wrote an update[5] about webcam support in Fedora, which will be worked on at FUDCon, and also blogged[6] about the session he will give on how to become a Fedora package maintainer.

Fedora Board member Chris Tyler wrote[7] about the plans for changing the scope and ownership of fedora-list. Chris says, it is "one of the first lists that most Fedora users join, and therefore quite important to the community. However, it's a high-volume list (and is sometimes perceived to have a high noise level), so many veterans of the Fedora community aren't subscribed... Paul Frields and I have taken on the ownership of the list, and we'd welcome one or two experienced members of the community to join us."

Luya Tshimbalanga alerted[1] the list to a post on FedoraForum.org in which a user "stevea" had produced a 67MB "minimalFedora" system. Jeff Spaleta worried[2] that the bare-bones system was unable to receive updates and that this was something which "we as a project might not officially want to endorse." One way out of that suggested by Jef was that interested parties could produce a derived distribution which pushed out entire updated images. Recent changes in the trademark guidelines make such a move easier.

A parallel to the minimal OS appliance image used in the oVirt project was discerned[3] by Daniel Berrange. Daniel reported their 'oVirt managed node' as being less than 64MB and built entirely from the Fedora 9 repositories. Later Daniel posted[4] that the similarities ended with the desire for a small image. The oVirt goal was to use only Fedora as upstream whereas stevea's approach had been to substitute coreutils with busybox. Daniel acknowledged "[...] finding the bits which aren't needed is fun in itself & somewhat of a moving target. So wherever possible we've been filing BZ to get some RPMs split up into finer grained sub-RPMs" and included a link to his project's kickstart %post stanza. Richard Jones suggested[5] that KDE's filelight was useful for finding bloated files and Vasile Gaburici added[6] that there was a GNOME equivalent called baobab. Vasile also included[7] a script which he uses to "keep track of bloatware".

A follow-up post from Daniel concluded[8] that the only bits of upstream Fedora actually used in stevea's approach were the kernel and busybox as even glibc and initscripts had been ditched. Daniel wondered "So not really much trace of Fedora left at all. Not sure why you'd go to the trouble of doing the initial anaconda install at that point - might as well just 'rpm *no-deps' install kernel + busybox RPMs into a chroot & add the custom init script."

Doubt on the advantages of stripping down Fedora to make it run on embedded targets was cast[9] by Patrice Kadionik when he argued that using the Fedora kernel with all its patches and modules was too bloated. Instead he preferred to use the vanilla kernel with busybox with the result that "[...] you have a Linux kernel (about 1MB) with its root [filesystem] (about 1-2 MB) adapted completely to the target platform." Alan Cox replied[10] that the ability to receive updates and benefit from the maintained and tested code was desirable if there were enough extra space.

W. Michael Petullo added a link[11] to his "FedoraNano" project which has the goal of reducing redundancies, identifying probable cases for sub-packaging and documenting a method to install a small Fedora onto solid state drives.

A question from Martin Langhoff asked[1]: "[i]s there anything preventing PK from connecting to the network over non-[NetworkManager]-controlled network interfaces?" This question appeared to be predicated on the assumption that PackageKit had a dependency on NetworkManager.

Jeremy Katz clarified[2] that PackageKit depended on NetworkManager-glib and not on NetworkManager. He added that this was because PackageKit attempted to determine the status of the network connection prior to checking for updates. Dan Williams confirmed[3] that this was the case and expanded on the explanation: "If talking to NM fails, the app should either (a) assume a connection, or (b) could be more intelligent by asking SIOCGIFCONF/netlink for interfaces, and if at least one interface is IFF_UP | IFF_RUNNING and has an IP address, then try." Using NetworkManager in this way allows PackageKit to be restricted to sensible choices about the type of networks over which it is acceptable to receive updates.

A further point raised by Martin was that there were a surprising number of dependencies and Dan pointed[4] to bugzilla entry#351101[5] while noting that "[PackageKit] should only depend on NetworkManager-glib, which itself should not pull in NetworkManager in the future." That bug specifically affects multilib systems, that is x86-64 systems with i386 packages on them, and prevents the simple removal of the older version of NetworkManager-glib and replacement with a re-factored one. This will be fixed for Fedora 10 using the installer anaconda.

In a separate thread Martin asked[6] what debugging facilities were available for network scripts beyond using bash -x. He detailed his "hack du jour" by which /etc/udev/rules.d/60-net.rules invokes net.hotplug.debugger which in turn uses bash -x net.hotplug with STDIN and STDOUT redirected to a logfile. It appeared from the lack of further suggestions that this is a good strategy. He also provided[7] a note which explained that he was upgrading the "School Server" spin to Fedora 9 from Fedora 7.

A response by Todd Zullinger to a "cvsextras" commit[1] of changes to git questioned[2] whether setting gitexecdir=%{_bindir} was a justified deviation from upstream intent. According to Todd "[..] we've effectively negated upstream's intent to present less binaries in the users path". Currently there are 137 git-commands in the /usr/bin directory. Todd suggested that it was better that individual users added the output of $(git *exec-path) to their PATH environment variable. As a precaution against breaking scripts upon update to git-1.6.0 Todd suggested that this addition to PATH should be made by the package.

The package maintainer responsible for the change, James Bowes replied[3] that he had recently attempted to do as Todd suggested and that had resulted in complaints. He was worried that although Todd's change made sense there had been no due diligence conducted to see what would break if the git-* commands were moved in such a way. Josh Boyer replied[4] that the original complaint had been about "yank[ing] out commands [...] from a stable release [Fedora 9]". Todd Zullinger discounted such complaints and dreamt[5] that "[...] a warning could be hand delivered by a beautiful naked person of whatever gender the user prefers and many would still scream when the change finally landed. :)" He suggested that in order to achieve predictability and consistency across distributions it was best to follow upstream and use the update to 1.6.0 as a flag day.

In response to queries as to whether there was a need to update Fedora 9 also Josh Boyer replied[6] that a security bug was fixed by git-1.6.0 but that he thought that this might have also been fixed by "a later release of 1.5.6.x."

Spurred on by the disquiet caused by the recent signing of Red Hat packages (but not as far as is known any Fedora packages)[1] it was suggested[2] by Bojan Smojver that multiple GPG signatures of RPM packages would be a good idea. Distributing the signing could include using alternate buildsystems "[...] with no public access [...] to verify package checks before signing[.]"

Andrew Bartlett thought that the checksum part would be a problem because a build often includes hosts, build times and other specifics and Chris Adams added[3] that even individual files within a package had such information embedded. Bojan decided to find out how many packages were so constrained and Seth Vidal suggested[4] a useful rpm command rpm -qp *dump pkg.rpm to list all available information about each package.

Seth was dubious about the general idea and upon being pressed doubted the security gain and noted the cost incurred on users trying to verify that a package was signed correctly. Bojan expanded[5] upon the idea that for a "[...] multi-key, multi-build system, an attacker would need to get his hands on a lot of private key passwords, break multiple independent build systems [...] It is similar to what a reporter does to confirm a story. One source, not so reliable. Two sources, more reliable. Many sources, most likely reliable." Stephen Smoogen described[6] this a logical fallacy and argued that due to the number of packages all signing would need to be automated and thus probably each of the multiple sources would "[...] get their information from the same top level source."

A useful post by Nils Philippsen laid out[7] four practical objections. Prime among these was that there were additional pieces of data, besides those mentioned above, embedded in a specific build even though the source package may have the same tag. The possibility of making the build system vulnerable to a DoS attack was also mentioned. A sub-thread on German banking practices and the value of multiple credentials developed[8] as did one[9] on the problems of determinism in producing identical binaries.

Tom Lane was also among those that expressed[10] a general skepticism that the increased burden of such a scheme was realistic: "Most of us [packagers] are overworked already. We aren't going to jump through any hoops for third-party signatories." Bojan argued[11] that if the system were automated then it probably would be vulnerable but suggested that it would be better if a community effort to absorb the extra non-automatic work would be a solution in line with "open source" practices. Reluctantly he concluded "[n]ever mind, it was just an idea. Probably not even a good one. Back to the drawing board... ;-)"

A politely phrased request[1] was made on 25-08-2008 by Mike Chambers for information about when normal service would resume in the Fedora Project after the disruptions[1a]. Enigmatically Dominik 'Rathann' Mierzejewski observed[2] that there had been "some speculation on fedora-advisory-board that might explain the information blackout, so please don't jump to conclusions until you really know what happened" This led Chris Adams to observe that the list archives appeared to be offline and to restate the request for information "[...] in the absence of information, rumors and speculation fill the gap (which is not good)."

Several days later (on 28-08-2008) a similar request was made[3] by Alan Dunn. He wondered whether bodhi was pushing updates out again, and Josh Boyer responded[4] that planning and implementation of "how to revoke the current gpg key used to sign RPMs" were in progress. Jesse Keating cautioned[5] that the migration to a new key would be slow "I'm currently re-signing all of the 8 and 9 content with these new keys so that we can make them available along with the new updates with the new key for these product lines. This is going to take some time due to the nature of how our signing works."

"nodata" asked[7] whether the new plans included a means to push out critical security updates even while there was a general outage. The thinking behind this seems to be that an attacker could decide to knock out Fedora infrastructure in order to gain some time to exploit a known vulnerability even if a simple fix existed. Jesse Keating replied[8] confidently that in such a scenario the Fedora Project would do "whatever it takes [...] to get a critical update onto a public webserver should the need arise" and cautioned against wasting time trying to plan for every possible scenario. Toshio Kuratomi added[9] that although it might be possible to speed up recovery "[...] unfortunately if the infrastructure problem is bad enough, there's no way we can push package X out until the problem is at least partially resolved."

On 27-08-2008 Paul Johnson noted that it was possible to "compose and build" and asked "when will updates via yum become available for rawhide?" Jeremy Katz responded[10] that "[a]t the moment, the compose is falling over for new reasons unrelated to the infrastructure changes. Hopefully we'll see a rawhide make its way out to the masses real soon now."

Paul forwarded a mail [2] send by Tim Burke, who is the Director of Linux Development inside Red Hat, praising the efforts of fedorans who rose to the occasion to bring things back on track after the recent incidents in Fedora infrastructure.

Axel described how he was keeping a partial check-out of packages, ie the ones which he was maintaining. Now he would like to be able to cvs up and have all updates flow in, but if he does do so cvs will want to get all other thousand packages in. He is currently using a for loop with pushd/popd, but this process is extremely slow. Axel asked if there was a better way of doing this?

Jesse created a user "masher" to have the ability to write to /mnt/koji/mash/ but not any of the other koji space. This is useful to prevent too much damage from a horribly wrong
rawhide compose. To make things easier in the rawhide compose configs, they decided to run the cron/scripts as the masher user. This is also good because it means things run unprivileged. However he ran into a snag. They have another user, 'ftpsync' that has write access to /pub/fedora/. Previously the rawhide script was ran as root, and thus it was no problem to su ftpsync for the rsync calls. The masher user does not possess the capability of doing this.

NicuBuculei asked[1] on @fedora-art about the plans to use the new Echo icon set as a default on Fedora 10: "considering the feature freeze, the Beta release and as Echo is not a feature proposed for F10, is correct the assumption that we won't have Echo as a default for F10, staying with Mist [at least] one more release cycle?"

In reply LuyaTshimbalanga pointed[2] out that it is still possible, due to a slip in the release cycle: "Shall we try to make it as Fedora 10 feature. Thanks to, in some extend, the incident, feature freeze has been moved on September 9th."

MartinSourada shared[3] his experience "It seems like artwork things are preferred to be decided by the Art Team rather than Fesco. I have a feeling it might be same for Echo." and proposed that this decision should be made together by the Art and Desktop teams "In this case I personally think Echo should be put on evaluation by Art Team and Desktop Team. If both agree it's ready for
default we can roll it in ;-)" while NicuBuculei stressed[4] the importance of having Art features listed "from a marketing POV, if we list it as a "feature" it will be picked by more news source and help building the excitement around the new release."

In the last FWN[1] issue we covered 'One Canvas workflow', an innovative way to create icons, this week it continued to be a topic on @fedora-art and MartinSourada introduced[2][3] a script that makes the work easier. "[It] greatly simplifies life for Echo artist, since all they need is to make the Source SVG, run the script on it, select which branches they'd like to push it to and write commit message(s) - i.e. it automates most of the process". He also wrote a blog post[4] about this and created a screencast[5] illustrating the process.

As there have been disruptions to the infrastructure of the Fedora Project this week there are no Security Advisories to report. Please see the Announcements and Development sections for more information.

Pasi Kärkkäinen forwarded[1] from xen-devel an announcement
of Xen 3.3.0. Pasi also followed up[2] on a thread from July where Daniel P. Berrange said about Fedora 10, "Even though we don't have any Dom0 I'll update it to 3.3.0 for the xen RPM and hypervisor. This will at least let people build their own legacy Xen kernel from upstream's 2.6.18 xen kernel"

Daniel P. Berrange posted[1] a todo list for libvirt which was the product of a brainstorming session at Red Hat. Daniel offered this list as a good starting point for those wishing to assist in the development of libvirt.

Chris Lalancette described[1] a feature that oVirt would
like to see. The feature would be a set of sanity checks a caller could make
to determine if live migration of a given virtual machine would be likely to
succeed.

Nguyen Anh Quynh asked[1] how libvirt can expose the unique features of a
given hypervisor such as the monitor interface of Qemu. Daniel P. Berrange responded[2] by stating the policy for adding new APIs to libvirt is that the conceptual representation has to be applicable to multiple hypervisors and unique concepts may be exposed if they can be represented in a way which
would also make sense for other hypervisors in the future. This goal is also stated in the libvirt architecture document.